Watching New York Watch the Election

While a fair number of New Yorkers may be at home alone tonight, watching prestige-TV reruns and trying to enter a fugue state, plenty of us plan to lean into the misery (or joy) of watching the election results in numbers. Screaming and crying — better together! To capture the mood, we sent our reporters all over the city and asked for reader snapshots of their nights out, from the scene in front of Trump Tower to a Chelsea gallery’s highbrow version of a potluck. Here’s what we’re seeing so far.

At Trump Tower, supporters waved a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump and celebrated.

At an East Village bar, Trump supporters cheer the results at an Election Night watch party sponsored by the New York Young Republicans Club.

12:44 a.m. It’s the end of the night for the Democratic Socialist Party’s official watch party at Heaven Can Wait in the East Village. The mood is resigned; people are hugging one another and one person wipes away a tear. Someone is still handing out DSA flyers as the last half-dozen people trickle out. —Camilia Fateh

11:32 p.m. There were cigarettes on the bar, empty glasses on the back tables, and only a dozen guests left at Sid Gold’s Request Room. Amy Hobby, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, co-owns the bar with her husband, a member of the Psychedelic Furs, and they had thrown a private party, marked on the bar’s calendar as “Go Kamala.” Really it was an informal gathering of women who work in film, with free pizza provided by the owner of Two Boots. There was a baby grand in the back for piano karaoke, and Christine Barker, a developer, started things off with “What’s Up.” Next, someone sang “California Dreamin’” when that state got called up on MSNBC. People started leaving. Someone offered Hobby a Xanax. She already had her own. “Everyone in this room has Xanax,” she said. She had recently asked her doctor for a prescription, and her doctor had asked why. “The election,” she said. She got the pills. The election might be turning against her, but Hobby was glad she created a way to be surrounded by friends. “This was really the best party to end the night at,” she said. —Adriane Quinlan

Members and supporters of the New York Immigration Coalition at an Election Night watch party at their offices in New York City.

10:25 p.m. On Threads, Wired reporter Makena Kelly shared:

I’m at the Peter Thiel–backed dating app the Right Stuff’s election party in Manhattan. There’s a big crowd sipping on an assortment of cocktails from the open bar while watching the results come in. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, there are a significantly higher number of men at this party than women, so not everyone is finding their soulmate tonight (since queer relationships were banned from the platform, despite Thiel being gay).

10 p.m. The mood is ebullient at the New York Young Republican Club’s watch party in the East Village. MAGA hats were spilling onto the street for a smoke break. —Charlotte Klein

9:45 p.m. Comedians Ella Yurman, Rebecca Weiser, Emily Wirth, Sydney Duncan, and Sheria Mattis are onstage at the Late Stage Live event at Brooklyn Art Haus. —Z.S.

9:30 p.m. On the top floor of a gutted townhouse turned events space on Crosby Street, the Reiki healer Adrienne White was offering compressed 15-minute sessions from a pillowed lounge she called the “Cloud Room.” Two stories down, the author Douglas Rushkoff preached to a crowd at an event that sold itself as a “Quaker meeting” held to “metabolize what we’re going through.” The venue he spoke at is CX, a members’ club that explains on placards throughout that it wants to help visitors “embrace … humanity in the age of the algorithm.” Still, it was impossible to avoid screens. MSNBC was projected onto a wall, and a laptop showing the New York Times home page was rigged to balance on a railing. Around 9:15, someone turned up the volume and Rachel Maddow’s voice rose above the chatter, warning that results would be coming in all night. White will lead a group Reiki session shortly before the party ends at midnight.
—Adriane Quinlan

9:30 p.m. At Singers in Bed-Stuy, RuPaul is on the screen, then CNN, then CNN with the audio turned off. —Zach Schiffman

9:15 p.m. At Balthazar, there are no TVs. Keith McNally is sitting at a table in the back with his laptop, receiving visitors. —Kim Velsey

8 p.m. At a party thrown in a Soho loft by The Free Press, a professional, politically mixed crowd talked over McDonald’s Big Macs, cheeseburgers, and Brat cocktails. You could still hear yourself talking. —Kim Velsey

7:35 p.m.:At Honey’s in Brooklyn, Writers Against the War on Gaza held an anti-watch party and fundraiser for Gaza.

7:34 p.m. The writer Dean Kissick thought an election watch party should have pie — the most American of foods — and on the way to Earth, a venue he helps run on Orchard Street, he stopped at Petee’s. It had apple. Kissick, a Brit who recently moved back to London, has an outsider’s view on both American snack options and the spectacle of the U.S. election, a perspective he shares with the co-founders of Earth, the artists Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann. For their election watch party, they plastered the windows of the white cube with oversize posters designed by the artist Richard Turley, hung an American flag they bought for a marathon Gertrude Stein reading, and lined chairs in front of a grid of four network-TV screens projected on the wall under a swirling, pixelated U.S. flag — a work of video art designed by Arthur Sillers, who was inspired by NBC’s Olympics coverage and wanted it to look like a “cacophony.” Outside, a contrarian in a MAGA hat leaned against the glass, and the crowd, a mix of writers and artists, milled about, smoking. They included the sculptor Genevieve Goffman, the writer Christian Lorentzen, and the artist who goes by Glosso and arrived in a T-shirt that showed Jesus rising above an eagle and an American flag. It was partly a joke, like the event itself, advertised as running from 6 p.m. “until it’s done.” “But we’re not going to be here for a week,” Sillers said. —Adriane Quinlan

5:17 p.m. Inside the cylindrical theater built for a Carrie Mae Weems show at Gladstone Gallery, the poet Terrance Hayes sat in front of a drum set and read from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. The gallery was hosting an Election Day reading organized by Precious Okoyomon, a poet who also works with food — which explained the free dinner she was cooking out front, a blue-chip version of a block-party barbecue. Around sunset, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija unveiled a paella with Nigerian and Thai flavors, a dish that fellow artist-chef Quori Theodor said was “kind of our election dish — the praxis of our lives.” An artsy crowd ate and sipped Modelos as the theater filled up, with the poet Anne Waldman looking on from stage left, Lynne Tillman perching on a low settee, and Padma Lakshmi in oversize aviators in a spot by the door. The party goes until midnight. —Adriane Quinlan

3:30 p.m. A Tesla Cybertruck parked outside Trump Tower has become a canvas for Trump graffiti. The truck has been there all day, and the spray-paint cans were provided by its owner, Dr. Boris Vitvitskiy, a physiatrist from Muncie, Indiana. Vitvitskiy is inviting onlookers to spray-paint his truck with messages in support of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Vitvitskiy says he has driven the truck across the United States to “show people what a Cybertruck is.” He bought it from a friend in Ohio and then stopped in Texas, California, Nevada, and Colorado. New York, on Election Day, is his final stop.

He urged people passing to sign the truck, saying, “If I leave and this truck isn’t destroyed with paint, I’ll be disappointed. It’s New York, you know.” A woman got into the truck and changed the music to play the theme song from Nickelodeon’s Victorious. A man who said he was from Italy brought over a bottle of Champagne, which Vitvitskiy proceeded to chug. “Honestly, I think he’s the president of the world. He’s gonna bring the world together,” he said. —Camilia Fateh

A truck owner drove a personal float through the Financial District.